Some assorted ideas

Social life, good friends

I realized that although I don't have much of a social life (preferring to be fairly solitary most of the time), I do have a surprising number of good friends.

It seems to me that a social life is something that you can turn on or off at will, and that the wisdom to know when and how to turn it on and off is important. (It seems that knowing one or the other is easy enough, but both is a harder proposition.)

Good friends are largely a separate issue, and probably much harder to get right.

Community seems to be separate again, and might denote routine interaction with everyday people with whom you share a duty of cooperation.

Family-type community seems to be separate again, and might denote the combination of frequent/routine socialization with good friends.

Mysterious.

Carrying my camera saps my energy

Lately I've not been taking as many photos, mainly because I've just wanted to get where I'm going. But I've still been carrying my camera, as I always do.

And I still get the same urges to take photos, but I follow through with those urges much less frequently.

I can't help but think that these unfulfilled urges share enough in common with frustration that it's not healthy.

I saw a woman with a Brompton at the station recently, and it struck me how rare that is to see. The same day I saw another woman on a Brompton.

It just goes to show that there is a lot going on all the time that we just fail to see. The world we see is, in important ways, the world we choose.

Science of humour

While exchanging puns with a friend recently it struck me that large aspects of humourous creativity could be automated. Puns can be automatically searched, leaving the comedian's job basically a task of including these automatically found gems in story-telling. The quality of the story-telling is what is funny, not the pun. But the pun is a sort of group-binding aspect.

Also, there are many formats of jokes, but the actual material of jokes is often similar between them. I would be interested to learn and think about the essence of humour: some sort of abstract, non-realized kernel of a joke that has to be rendered in order to be funny or comprehensible.

How on earth do teachers manage?

To read various prominent bloggers today you'd think that project management was a mythical art, founded in contradiction and impossibility. Now if adult professionals are that hard to manage, how on EARTH do teachers manage to herd groups of 30 or more CHILDREN through exams under TOTALLY RIGID deadlines, on a regular basis, with astonishing success?

Perhaps climate refugees will be people with a close relationship to the land they lost. An increasing number of them will be living amongst those of us with a minimal understanding of and relationship to the land. That may be highly interesting. And also a massive opportunity for misunderstanding.

Formal language / metalanguage

Metalanguage (natural language, as opposed to object language) is a bridge between unspeakable creativity (see Robert Pirsig / MOQ / Quality) and frozen results (object language): it might be nice to mix these vocabularies a bit more though, allowing hard links to frozen results in unspeakable creativity, and unspeakable creativity in frozen results...